Sometimes sanity and common sense wins on Wall Street. Just look at market-leading Amazon.com

While the stock market has always been the ideal case study for behavioral psychologists, emotion drives it harder now more than ever. For better or worse, you have to know how to play both sides of the coin.

Consider Netflix ( NFLX). I proudly -- and accurately -- ride both sides of the fence on this one.

Sanity, logical thought, rationality -- for once, it made more than a cameo appearance on the stock market. It prevailed.

Don't look now, but the old guard media names -- DIS, News Corp ( NWSA) and Time Warner ( TWX) -- easily outperformed NFLX over the last year. They're the types of names you own with confidence for the long term.

In a perfect world, old-guard media stocks outperform NFLX because they operate from superior positions of strength. Ultimately, Pandora wins out because those of us who follow the company closely and interface with its executives know it's for real. At day's end, AAPL achieves lofty price targets because that company only loses if it beats itself.

We get glimpses of sanity on Wall Street all of the time, even from its crew of hack analysts.

Now, Morgan (enter cheesy financial media cliche here) pounds the table for AMZN on the basis of sustainable international growth. That's icing on the cake man. I love the thesis, but the Amazon story still happens at home. On Christmas Day, the company had more traffic -- almost four times as much traffic -- than Walmart's ( WMT) Web site.